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About

Kristyn Hensby is a researcher specializing in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), with a particular focus on social robotics for young children in early learning environments. Her work sits at the intersection of child development, interaction design, and data analysis, exploring how robots can meaningfully engage with children aged 2–6 in educational and social contexts. Hensby's most cited work, "Spatiotemporal Aspects of Engagement during Dialogic Storytelling Child–Robot Interaction" (2017, 21 citations), examines how robots can sustain social engagement over time by adapting their behavior contingently — a critical capability for robots deployed in learning environments. Her research into children's touch behaviors, published across multiple venues in 2016 and accumulating nearly 30 combined citations, pioneered novel data visualization techniques to interpret complex HRI datasets and better understand how children physically interact with robots — informing safer and more robust robot design. Hensby has also contributed innovative methodological approaches to the field, notably through her exploration of "pretotyping" — low-cost prototyping strategies to gauge real-world viability — applied to a social ethnodroid designed to interact with young children. Across her body of work, Hensby demonstrates a consistent commitment to grounding robot design in empirical observation of children's natural behaviors and expectations.